FA+
Shop
Some random stuff about getting older
10 years ago
It's weird being this old. I certainly never expected to live quite this long. Discussion of mortality aside I've noticed things in passing;
* I've been around to watch things grow from new ideas into societal standbys. Obviously I remember when the internet was new, an exciting frontier, and the idea of staying up all night surfing the web was exotic. I remember my grandparents getting a wireless phone and at the time I would never have imagined being in a society that pretty much expected you'd carry one with you all the time.
But there are other things too, more cultural details. I can remember Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles being this new trend, I can remember Smurfs being something new to quasi-rural Georgia, I can remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in the movie theater or Robocop being this new amazing thing. I got into D&D, not during the little spike of a fad it had, but in the aftermath - a friend had a second set of books that his cousin had before losing interest, otherwise I could never have afforded my own set. I can remember going to the games store and wow, there were these amazing new Citadel Miniatures from Britain that looked differently cool from what I was used to. More recently I remember Spectrum being a new thing, Magic the Gathering being a new thing (I have a story about how I didn't get into MtG!), Jurassic Park being a new deal with dino damage! toys. Stuff like that.
You never really know what bit of cultural gunk is going on now that in a couple of decades will be this established thing. I bet it's like that with every generation actually.
* One of the neater things is how access makes the internet a different medium from television or radio. Even UHF channels or ham radio were really specific, really needed pricey equipment and a lot of commitment to pull off. But despite all the attempts to make the internet just another basically soulless marketing tool, there's this really solid heart to it, people making art, sharing their hobbies, putting writing out there. When I was a kid there was nothing even vaguely like it and it's really very hopeful to see.
* Another stupidly cool thing about getting older is dinosaurs. When I was a kid, therapods were tail-dragging dull-colored ectotherms hunting sprawl-stanced ceratopsians, discovered in places like Montana or midwestern Canada or slate quarries in Europe - and of course I was completely in love with them! Paleontologists had discovered Deinonynchus a while back, and yet if any kid even thought about those dinosaurs, their conception looked 'way different from even a 1993 take on them! As I grew older I started learning that therapods were a lot more active than that, that therapod and ceratopsian alike moved differently, that cool fossils were showing up in China or Antarctica. Now it's 2015, and we've found a lot more of the feathers that weren't even present in theories when I was a kid - suggestions of pigment, analysis of remains show that Torosaurus and Triceratops were different ages but the same animals as were a lot of the Hell Creek species, new cool finds like Nasutoceratops and Zhenyuanlong and Regaliceratops join the roster of stuff to think about. It's incredibly exciting!
When I'm old, when I'm truly an old man, what sort of exciting and cool stuff will we know about dinosaurs then?
* I've been around to watch things grow from new ideas into societal standbys. Obviously I remember when the internet was new, an exciting frontier, and the idea of staying up all night surfing the web was exotic. I remember my grandparents getting a wireless phone and at the time I would never have imagined being in a society that pretty much expected you'd carry one with you all the time.
But there are other things too, more cultural details. I can remember Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles being this new trend, I can remember Smurfs being something new to quasi-rural Georgia, I can remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark in the movie theater or Robocop being this new amazing thing. I got into D&D, not during the little spike of a fad it had, but in the aftermath - a friend had a second set of books that his cousin had before losing interest, otherwise I could never have afforded my own set. I can remember going to the games store and wow, there were these amazing new Citadel Miniatures from Britain that looked differently cool from what I was used to. More recently I remember Spectrum being a new thing, Magic the Gathering being a new thing (I have a story about how I didn't get into MtG!), Jurassic Park being a new deal with dino damage! toys. Stuff like that.
You never really know what bit of cultural gunk is going on now that in a couple of decades will be this established thing. I bet it's like that with every generation actually.
* One of the neater things is how access makes the internet a different medium from television or radio. Even UHF channels or ham radio were really specific, really needed pricey equipment and a lot of commitment to pull off. But despite all the attempts to make the internet just another basically soulless marketing tool, there's this really solid heart to it, people making art, sharing their hobbies, putting writing out there. When I was a kid there was nothing even vaguely like it and it's really very hopeful to see.
* Another stupidly cool thing about getting older is dinosaurs. When I was a kid, therapods were tail-dragging dull-colored ectotherms hunting sprawl-stanced ceratopsians, discovered in places like Montana or midwestern Canada or slate quarries in Europe - and of course I was completely in love with them! Paleontologists had discovered Deinonynchus a while back, and yet if any kid even thought about those dinosaurs, their conception looked 'way different from even a 1993 take on them! As I grew older I started learning that therapods were a lot more active than that, that therapod and ceratopsian alike moved differently, that cool fossils were showing up in China or Antarctica. Now it's 2015, and we've found a lot more of the feathers that weren't even present in theories when I was a kid - suggestions of pigment, analysis of remains show that Torosaurus and Triceratops were different ages but the same animals as were a lot of the Hell Creek species, new cool finds like Nasutoceratops and Zhenyuanlong and Regaliceratops join the roster of stuff to think about. It's incredibly exciting!
When I'm old, when I'm truly an old man, what sort of exciting and cool stuff will we know about dinosaurs then?
Deinonychus is a sweet dinosaur too...
*imagines a world if they have evolved to full sentience instead of a primate doing so*
It feels like just a short time ago, I was young. I still feel like I am in a lot of ways. I forget that I'm no longer fresh out of school, and out exploring a big new world. It kind of leaves me feeling displaced.
The subjectivity of it is weird. Like I know that my memories of being a child were years and years and years back - but about equally so are my memories of graduating college, or actually hearing Jack Horner give a lecture, or the first furry con I ever attended, or the time actually understanding spacial relationships as part of drawing suddenly clicked in my brain, or things in my relationship with my last girlfriend. Further Confusion this last year was long ago, but so's Further Confusion back at the Doubletree.
I think this is part of why it's so easy to have that weird loss of time. "I know I'm technically middle-aged, but wait wait wait I was 25 not that long ago!" And of course time rolls on subtly, one day becomes the next becomes the next week and the next month and the next year and suddenly yeah, that stuff was a while back. And of course there's no quick easy toggle switch in our brains like how we've sort of been set up to believe that life works by this script, where the 30s-40s part of the script is about being really settled emotionally in a way which honestly I'm not and maybe nearly nobody is.
Now you can buy a cheapo china noname tablet and you can have all the existing oWoD rulebooks... I cant find the exact quote from the Genie... something like "super mega cosmical powers... in a tiny little place!"
You could ask, no one had a laptop? No one XD as it was expensive and students.
DevArt were different much in 2006ish also, ppl were more prone to comment on non-professional art. It was not a thing to be a "high-viewcount" artist to random fav "shit art" to get even more views and such...
And I remember using one of gran's shopping trolleys to carry my Shadowrun stuff to and from games.
I remember how excited I was to get my own copy of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, with the cool efreet on the cover. Man, I read and read that book, and looked up all the words I didn't know, getting the dictionary down from the shelf. Who knew that the male complement of a nymphomaniac was a satyriac? Not me in 1984!
With any luck, man, when we're old there'll be dinosaurs again!
Wow, do you still have the review cards? That's an awesome memory to have.
The thing that I have the hardest time wrapping my head around is people who have grown up always having the internet. I had used it a little bit at cyber cafés, but didn't get regular access until I was at college, aged 16 or 17, and I didn't have net access at home for a year or two after that -- even then it was dial-up that I could only use after 6pm if I didn't want an astronomical phone bill. I feel kinda left behind now as I can't get anything better than ADSL, and all sorts of things -- games especially -- are just getting bigger all the time.
Always having a phone to hand is weird too. Even for some time after I first got a mobile phone, the call costs were high enough that it was usually better to find a phone booth. Although I've had a mobile since maybe 2000 or 2001, I've only had a smartphone for a couple of years, and by and large I don't really get on with it.
Is there a time you particularly reminisce about? For me it's the mid-90s, when I was at art college, and I was getting into all this awesome stuff like roleplaying in general and World of Darkness in specific -- I did a whole bunch of LARP, travelled all over the county to different games -- Warhammer, Magic, and exploring the beginnings of therianthropy and the like with this newfangled internet, which would later lead to furry. It was also the time I started feeling a lot more okay about being gay.
Mentioning WoD reminds me. I had an idea for a picture, and I wanted to run the idea by a shortlist of artists, including yourself. I pretty much gave up on Twitter -- it was aggravating my anxiety something fierce -- but I can send you a note or shoot you an email.
I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I'd had the internet around growing up, and of course I tend to think "better," but who knows what things would have actually been like?
The weird thing is if I were going to be nostalgic it'd be for about the same time period. The mid to late 90s were not an easy time for me, not at all. I was not very well off, not very sane, and frequently bitterly unhappy. I mean, how could I be any of those things? I wasn't coming from a particularly healthy background. But at the same time there were some really neat imaginative things (roleplaying games included - I remember things like Earthdawn and some of the WtA stuff and how that felt like an incredible opening up of the world), the recession and the bitterness of the Bush years hadn't happened yet, I lived in a really neat little college town which at the time wasn't too commercial or gentrified, and best of all I had some very good friends. I feel like I was really lucky to have my first real experiences with adulthood in a somewhat more user friendly time and place.
Lately my day job has been really eating me alive so I'm reluctant to commit to anything, but please do email and/or note me. Obviously doing black and white work is going to be a lot easier to do timewise.
Now I think about it I wasn't in a great way mid-late 90s myself. Mostly broke, dealing with my asshole father, depression stuffs not well treated. But at the same time there was some really super cool stuff.
I'm gonna drop you a quick note because I am bad at keeping track of email lately. There's basically only 2 or 3 artists I know of that will get what I'm thinking straight away without needing an elaborate explanation :3
Or maybe they feel young inside. Who knows.
Dinosaurs.